Three Feet Under - Chapter One

three feet under - chapter one

hello hello! i've been working on a pre-canon different first meeting bobby & buck au for a month or so and now that 'everything has its place' has wrapped up, i wanted to give a little peek! this fic is from bobby's pov and starts a month after the fire.

(trigger warnings are abundant for 'three feet under' but for this snippet they're: child loss, substance abuse, past child abuse, and suicidal ideation)

The closest to his family that Bobby Nash can get is in warped reflections on polished granite headstones.

He’s worn down an edge of the plot: two indents for his knees to fall into as he silently prays and wordlessly begs. Mornings and nights and neither and both of graveside prostration have dug out a damned-dark and crisp-cold hole for him to fall into. When the time comes, he’ll lay himself down to sleep. He pictures the thaw as a revelation. Bones in the dust and fat melting hot-acrid in the earth; maggots and larvae and he finally found rest. His priest calls this season an act of God: as long as all the psalms and a testament unto itself. Bobby calls it evidence of God’s sense of humor.

Smoke billowed out of gaping maws in the apartment complex until steam took its place, white and grey on a white-grey sky when morning stole away the night. Cold tempered hot and hot taunted cold and cosmic cruelty lodged itself between the two; frostbite claimed scant slivers of skin not licked by flame. Bobby watched each and every one of his victims as they were freed from the pyre he lit with percocet and vodka and snarling cowardice. He named them when he could and when he couldn’t, he honored them with a sip taking him closer to his end. Winter has found forever in St. Paul. Bobby hopes he has found eternity.

The closest to God that Bobby Nash can get is at the bottom of a bottle, choking on dregs and memories.

He tells himself it isn’t blasphemy, isn’t divine disrespect; he tells himself a good many things as he finds truth in lies and lies in truth. The pills dull his thoughts until he makes his own peace. The booze is so cheap that he isn’t sure if it even has a name but he knows it makes him forget his own. Daysweeks pass in a haze and collect into a mass of fuzzy warmth that never gets close to the feeling of fire. He claims his punishment in the temptation of fate as he throws drugs back blindly and drinks until he can no longer see.

Tonight, he can still see.

Cheek perched on his palm, he lifts two fingers off of his glass. The bartender, too bright and young of eye, nods slowly. Everything is slow when the liquor swamps his bloodstream. He lives in a miasma of motion, taking in little and making even less sense of it. 

“This is gonna have to be your last one for today, man,” the kid says, quiet as the depths of night draw in, last-call last-chance hovering over the liminal space. 

Bobby grunts and necks the swill down. These days, he thinks he didn’t only start chasing fire to follow in his father’s fateful footsteps: he figures he’s always been chasing pain. His throat is long since numbed to the sting of cheap spirits and cheaper regrets.

Vinny’s is less of a hole in the wall and more of a slash in the ground, the dive bar’s foundation sinking into the Minnesota soil with the burden of its occupants and the demons perched cinder block-strong on their shoulders. It’s far from his usual badge haunt, halfway between his house and his home. Only his home fell to embers. His station hardened to ice and Bobby is weak. He doesn’t care to find out their opinion of him or how far the rumors have spread. All he knows is that they haven’t reached this hellish haven and he can drink himself into a stupor, sleep it off under a veil of insubstantial substances. He hopes to repeat the routine ad nauseam until his nausea consumes him and his liver realizes there’s no point in holding on.

Fifty cent songs croon from the jukebox; corpses that haven’t yet caught up to their fates drown out the noise in bottles of amber and plague-sick green. Bobby’s world is red: red bodies and red flames and the red label on a clear bottle that tastes like mangled memory clouding the nip of red blood in the air. His palms are red, too. 

The night he murdered his family wasn’t the first time he got burned. That was eight years old and a matchbox and the back of a hand across his cheek and a crick in his neck and a blistered scar shaped like Australia on his calf and— The second time was his fault (his fault, his fault, his fault; they were all his fault) when he forgot to disengage the airbags at a scene his fourth day on the job. It was fine because the blast barely scalded his skin and his father wasn’t there to say I told you so. It was fine. It was. The third time was an electrical accident but it made Marcy cry, so he swore not to do it again.

He did it again. He did it again and again and he did it worse each time; the scars he left never touched his flesh except for when they touched his flesh and blood in little flinches of fallout. The doctor said he might not regain full sensation in his hands and that’s alright, that’s okay. He deserves it. He’ll never be able to feel Brook’s hair or Robby’s hand or Marcy’s lips so it doesn’t matter anyway. The glass is slick in his grasp. He only knows that because it always is. Whiskeyvodkarum tumbles down his throat and then it’s gone; he’s empty. He closes out his tab and tugs on his coat. He leaves.

If he wanders a bit to the left then he’ll take a nice long walk off of a short riverbank and meet his maker in a chilling embrace. If he wanders a bit to the right then he’ll be able to understand what his patients felt when a bumper separated their pelvis and their shoes stayed on the ground as they fought the clutches of gravity. He keeps on his path. It’s not a lengthy trip and his destination is nothing like home; it’s everything like home for it smells of sulfur and smoke and there’s a picture of his family waiting for him, a rubber band holding it to the sun visor of his rusted-out truck. He’d lock the car if he had anything of worth inside of it other than the creased paper he stole from their memorial service. He’d lock it if a too-late part of him didn’t accept that other hands than his would hold the photo with more care than he could ever spare for his family.

Charlie brought the picture to the funeral home. He cropped it out of a Christmas card from the year before, the year before that, an in between year when Bobby’s spine was a crooked steeple and he fancied that he placed himself on the cross. Crucifixion came in the form of uppers and downers and he fell into the sepulcher of his worst impulses when a held-back shout hit harder than any fist. The tinsel border is still visible in the photo. Happy holidays, indeed. 

Tragedy—Bobby—struck in the dead of night. The city hasn’t roused from its mourning long enough to take down red lights and green lights, take back their good tidings and well wishes. It’s a locked-in-buckled-up reminder of what once was and will never be again; it’s a broken projector casting flickering shadows of a single frame that defines a people. Angels hung upon the walls of the funeral home in robes of white and gold and Bobby’s angels rotted in boxes of pine, their Sunday best churned into the earth with them.

He held it together at the service until he couldn’t and then he cried until he had no more tears. His words dried up with them and he stood, blank and numb and black-hole-wanting as Charlie took out one year, two years, tentwentythirty of Bobby’s Hell out on him in the cold-scorched courtyard of the cemetery: every stint at rehab, every squandered chance, every time he disappeared and Marcy was left to fend for herself. Bobby was and is and will be worse than Tim ever could have dreamt of; their father had the decency to die. Mom stood by silently, a statue amongst statues amongst graves.

And Bobby broke that night, not the snap of a branch but the crack-creak-whip of a whole trunk toppling over, taking out the next and the next and the next. He broke like his nails as they scrambled through the frozen soil, jealously clawing, dragon-strong and man-weak when he scored the disturbed ground so he could curl up with his family in a horde of the best he could do. He split the grafts off of his palms and watched blood melt a covering of snow far gentler than any embrace he’d ever offered. Charlie hauled him away with arms of overwrought iron, bars around the bars of his ribs.

“This is the last time I clean up your mess,” Charlie muttered and Bobby believed him, still does. Stowed in the passenger seat of his own truck, Bobby watched the bloated sky mist past as Charlie drove and drove and drove until he realized they never really drove at all, two blocks away from the cemetery, exhaust like smoke in the parking lot as the truck idled. A bar, the bar, this bar and it was close enough to the graves that Bobby stayed. Charlie left.

Bobby takes a handful of pills. He sleeps.